The 3D printing group appoints former Cognex chief Rob Willett as it quietly reshapes its governance. And starts to look a lot like a company getting ready for something.
When a privately held industrial tech company replaces a founding-era board member with a veteran of Nasdaq-listed industrial firms, the move rarely goes unnoticed. Formlabs, the Somerville, Massachusetts-based 3D printing group, has done exactly that, and the company’s own language about the appointment makes the subtext unusually easy to read.
Rob Willett, the former chief executive of Cognex, the machine vision company that has traded publicly since 1989, joins Formlabs’ board with immediate effect. He replaces Carl Bass, the former Autodesk chief executive who has served as a director since 2017.
At the time of writing, Formlabs has not replied to a question as to whether this appointment represents pre-IPO groundwork or is more IPO-optionality. But the appointment carries its own commentary.
Why Willett, and why now
Cognex built its business on precisely the model that industrial technology investors have rewarded most reliably: proprietary hardware integrated with software, recurring revenue tied to installed equipment, and global manufacturing customers who make switching painful. When Willett left in 2025 after almost 18 years with the company, 14 of them as chief executive, the company had grown into a billion-dollar enterprise supplying inspection and guidance systems across electronics, automotive and logistics.
The Formlabs Manufacturing Network, a vetted collection of Formlabs’ 3D printer owners who make surplus capacity available, recently passed the 50,000 print mark.
That trajectory maps onto what Formlabs has been quietly constructing. Its desktop and industrial systems, spanning stereolithography and selective laser sintering, now serve engineers, dental labs, healthcare providers and manufacturers. More importantly, they run on proprietary resins and powders that customers must continue buying once a printer is installed. The company says more than 500 million parts have been produced on its systems. That is not a prototyping business. That is infrastructure.
Natan Linder, co-founder and chairman, framed the transition carefully. “As Formlabs continues its evolution from breakthrough startup to enduring manufacturing platform,” he said, “his experience scaling complex hardware and automation companies will be invaluable.” The phrase “enduring manufacturing platform” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Formlabs does not disclose financial results, but industry estimates place annual revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars, supported by a large installed base of printers and recurring materials sales. That scale would place it among the larger privately held additive manufacturing firms, and within the range where public market listings become viable, particularly if growth and margins remain stable.
What Bass helped build, and what comes next
Bass, who led Autodesk from 2006 to 2017, joined Formlabs at a different moment: one focused on legitimacy. His role was to signal to the market that serious people believed in additive manufacturing as a professional tool, not a hobbyist curiosity. He helped guide the company through its expansion into SLS sintering, developing a category where earlier market entrants struggled to gain a foothold, and into higher-throughput production systems.
That work is done. The question Formlabs now faces is not whether its technology is credible, but whether its business model can perform at scale in front of quarterly reporting requirements and institutional investors. That is a different kind of challenge, and it requires different experience on the board.
The SPAC wreckage that Formlabs has avoided
Formlabs has watched its sector go through a brutal reckoning. Desktop Metal, Markforged, and Velo3D all entered the public markets through special-purpose acquisition companies between 2020 and 2021, riding a wave of enthusiasm for digital manufacturing that proved significantly ahead of revenue.
The companies that have held up better (Stratasys, 3D Systems) are those that emphasised recurring revenue from materials and services rather than hardware sales alone. Investors learned, the hard way, that additive manufacturing companies are not software businesses. Their capital intensity is real, their sales cycles are long, and their margins require discipline to protect.
Formlabs, which has raised more than $250 million since its founding in 2011 from investors including New Enterprise Associates, Foundry Group, Tyche Partners, and SoftBank, has been private long enough that exit pressure is not a hypothetical. More than a decade of venture ownership means early investors are watching their options. A public listing, a secondary transaction, or an acquisition would each provide liquidity. The governance changes being made now are consistent with preparing for at least one of those outcomes.
In 2021, Co-founder Max Lobovsky said regarding a potential IPO, “We’d rather take our time and be really ready to be an excellent public company, to be large enough to be a successful public company, and then go public at that point.”
The industrial technology template
The Cognex parallel is worth taking seriously. The machine vision company scaled from niche inspection tool to essential manufacturing component by combining hardware lock-in with software that made customers reluctant to leave. Its operating margins have remained among the strongest in industrial technology throughout cycles of demand volatility.
Formlabs is attempting something similar. Besides building products that work well and customers actually want to use, its software layer (managing print workflows, optimising production runs, monitoring system performance) creates stickiness beyond the materials relationship. Customers who integrate Formlabs systems into factory processes are not making a decision they revisit lightly. That switching cost is exactly what public market investors in industrial technology pay a premium to own.
Preparing for a public listing typically involves changes beyond governance, including financial reporting infrastructure, internal controls compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, and increased operational predictability. Board composition is often one of the earliest visible signals, particularly the addition of directors with experience operating public companies through earnings cycles.
Whether Formlabs can demonstrate the margin profile and revenue predictability that those investors expect is the question that a Willett appointment begins to answer. He knows how to run a hardware company through earnings cycles. He knows what analysts ask about capital allocation, gross margins, and geographic expansion. He knows, in other words, what it takes to be a public company, which may be precisely why he is now on this board. The transition, if it comes, will test whether Formlabs can preserve its long-term execution while adapting to the financial transparency and consistency that public investors demand.
Formlabs has not responded to a request for comment on any plans regarding a public listing.
